Jisu Sheen photos
Jacdelyn McAdams with her final projects from the course.
McAdams' album art.
Jacdelyn McAdams is about to enter her senior year at Wilbur Cross High School. “I’m 16 now, going to college soon,” she said, “but I’m still this little girl.”
She looked toward the passport photo of herself as a kid on an album cover she made at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU)’s five-week graphic design Summer Studio, a college-level intensive for high school students interested in art.
The original passport picture had been marred by cracks over time, but McAdams used her newfound Photoshop tools to remove the lines. “Still got the same hope and dreams,” McAdams said. Printed in a serif script above her eyebrow on the fictional album art was the title Still Her.
McAdams was at the Summer Studio’s graduation ceremony, which took place midday Thursday at SCSU’s Earl Hall with a guest talk from a working designer and a final showcase of the students’ art.
The annual summer program, founded five years ago by Connecticut designer DJ Haddad in collaboration with professional graphic design association American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), sets kids up with the technical skills and materials they might need to create the art they dream of.
The seven graduates in this year’s cohort received, along with their diplomas, a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet, a one-year free subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud professional software suite, and three college credits in design.
“I really got to express myself through all my projects,” McAdams said, noting the same held true for the rest of her cohort too. For example, classmate Caden Suarez, who McAdams said is “really into video games,” made album art with videogame-style illustrations and a poster titled “As a Game Designer.”
Melanie Uribe, co-founder and director of the Summer Studio and president of AIGA Connecticut, added “teacher” to her list of roles for this year’s session. Uribe is an assistant professor of art and design at SCSU, and she brought those skills to the forefront, helping students learn a new graphic design program every week.
“Ah, it was awesome,” said Haddad. “This was a really good group. Over the past five years of summer studios, there have always been standouts, Haddad said. This year, the whole group was the standout.
“I really, truly loved the program,” said freshly graduated Summer Studio student Jeronimo Restrepo, praising the environment, the design studio, and the TAs. He told me about a week where the prompt was to create a travel magazine together using the Adobe program InDesign.
Because InDesign’s functionality is mostly in layout and publishing, the students had to pull from previous weeks’ knowledge of programs Photoshop and Illustrator to work with the elements on the pages. They removed photo backgrounds, played with fonts, and put together a cohesive aesthetic.
Each student chose a different travel destination to feature in their own double-page spread. McAdams chose Mykonos.
“Wanna taste Greece? Freskos has you covered with juicy chicken souvlaki and loaded gyros wrapped in warm pita,” a small section on the second page read.
McAdams knew the menu well; when she’s not in classes or making art, she works at the Greek restaurant she shouted out, Freskos in Hamden. Her job inspired her to choose Mykonos as her design topic for the project instead of her usual choice — her home country, the Dominican Republic.
I asked if she showed the travel spread to her friends at work. “My boss loved it,” McAdams said. Her coworkers were surprised, she added, and were fans of the art as well.
“I made one major mistake,” McAdams said, already letting it roll off her back. That top picture? “It’s actually Santorini,” not Mykonos. She had gotten her first taste of a classic graphic design mixup, confusing one city for another, but she took the mixup with grace.
“Make sure you praise yourself,” Uribe said to the students before they dispersed. The Summer Studio was a place to gain skills and create a portfolio, but it was also a small universe where students could practice being designers, with heavy technical support always on hand so they could feel free to let creativity fly.
Jeronimo Restrepo's artwork from the program, including an EDM album cover with a custom font.
Restrepo and Uribe at the graduation ceremony, in the computer studio where the students did much of their work.